The wreckage of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has balkanized her supporters. An inside look from the Democratic National Convention.

By day, Myra Winovich is an orange T-shirted, officially nonpartisan Democratic Convention volunteer who paid her own way from California to help load convention delegates on buses and get them headed in the right direction. By night, she is a former registered Republican and passionate Obama supporter who is trying to figure out why women Clinton supporters are struggling to get behind her man.

Winovich, a bubbly 69-year-old retired Realtor, found life in Republican America very good. Her family emigrated here from Finland when she was 11, building a life that, as a successful Realtor, enabled her to take advantage of "all the tax loopholes." She retired comfortably, with more than enough left over to help her grandchildren with college. Then one day she realized that while she was able to help her grandchildren, her children weren't going to find helping their own children quite so easy.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

"There's no middle class," she says with a convert's zeal. "About four years ago" -- about the time she heard Barack Obama give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention -- "I realized that all those things I thought was wonderful about America weren't there. College education. Cramming 36 children in a classroom. Health care. Potholes in the street. War. Barack's issues were the same issues I've been ignoring all along."

Most Popular

So now, missionary-like, she's in Denver going from street corner to lunch counter to hotel lobby trying to figure out why the rupture between Hillary Clinton supporters threatens to damage the party and possibly hand the November election to John McCain. As a Realtor, she's trying first to identify the problem and then make the sale. "Being a woman," she says, "it is interesting how different we are."

On a street in downtown Denver she engaged a group of women from Florida -- not delegates, she thinks -- who were protesting Clinton's failure to capture the Democratic nomination. "I started marching along with their placards. I really wanted to see if it can be unified, was it about Hillary.

"They said, 'Obama cheated Hillary,' Winovich remembers. "I say, 'OK, it's time to hug, and it's time to unify. Give me a hug.' They say, 'Absolutely not.' I say, 'Hillary tells you to support Obama.' They said it doesn't matter."

Having organized for Obama for over a year, Winovich expresses doubt the women are even registered to vote, but if they are "they're the kinds that will vote for McCain."

At a lunch counter, Winovich encountered "the misty type" of Clinton delegate, "the sensitive type that's really hurt." Those types, says Winovich, have a passion for Hillary that "burns and can't transplant." Their "main thing was to see a woman elected," and they "hug easy" but say, "I can't -- I'll do my vote but I can't work for him."

Finally, Winovich says, there are the bitter ones, like the woman she met in the Colorado Convention Center.

"You mention Obama and they turn away." Those types, she says, can't even look at an Obama button. "I don't think it's about issues for them; it's like someone took their boyfriend away." These women, Winovich thinks, are likely to sit this election out.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Over the past month, a lot of ink and airtime has been devoted to figuring out just how mad the female Hillary delegates -- and by extension, the Hillary voters -- are. They couldn't be mad enough -- crazy enough -- to act against their own best interests, could they?

Analysis has blindly run along predictable lines. On the eve of the convention opening, USA Today ran a front-page poll saying fewer than 50 percent of Clinton supporters were solidly behind Obama. To help explain this, the paper went to... a man. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell was only too happy to explain that he knew "a lot of hardened Clinton supporters who are going to be OK, they're going wind up supporting Sen. Obama." They are, one can't resist finishing for the governor, going to be good girls.

It's important to understand that the Hillary Clinton story can be read in two ways. The operative one here is not the conventional reading. In this one, Hillary Clinton is not a public figure, a U.S. Senator, a presidential candidate because she is married to, and shares a name with, a popular president.

In this reading, Hillary Clinton achieved national political credibility despite the fact that she was forced to abandon her last name and adopt her husband's so he could run for president, because she was reviled for being too smart, because she made it her business to make her place in places they said she didn't belong, because she stuck up for a husband who turned out to be a liar, and not only for giving up almost everything for a man's ambitions but for finally having a chance to get it back. These women get it. They get her.

Tuesday, the second day of the convention, is coincidentally the 88th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote. Lest it be considered ancient history -- and in the Pepsi Arena it seemed to be -- it is worth remembering that a number of convention delegates were born into a world where women could not cast a ballot. A last-minute illness forced the oldest delegate, the 91-year-old former mayor of Pittsburgh, Sophie Masloff, to stay home, but she has plenty of peers like Elizabeth Morgan, 91, of Detroit, a retired UAW international union rep. They had to live a long time to see the day when a woman would seriously contend for the presidential nomination, but they have seen it.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Tuesday morning, the Lifetime television network sponsors the Democratic Women's Caucus salute to "Women Making History" in the Colorado Convention Center. Lifetime has placed a colorful tambourine on each seat, and some 3,000 -- sometimes more, sometimes less -- women shake them and cheer as a parade of female senators, representatives, businesswomen, fundraisers, and actresses who have played a sitcom Nanny and a Desperate Housewife take turns at the podium. At the rear of the vast hall stands an intense blond woman, mostly ignored, sometimes hissed at, holding an America con Hillary sign.

Borjas is a member of PUMA PAC (People United Making Action to the FEC; Put Up, My Ass to its devotees), a nonaffiliated 527 organization founded by a Massachusetts woman named Darragh Murphy (the implications of Murphy's 2004 financial support of McCain have yet to make much of an impression on the PUMAs, most of whom are devoted Hillary Clinton supporters). A twice-divorced mother of two teenagers and a devout Catholic, Borjas -- who is a registered voter -- first got involved in Democratic Party politics in Texas, moving on to New Mexico and California and growing increasingly disenchanted with androcentric party politics with each relocation.

Recently laid off from her job as an executive assistant -- "I guess I speak up too much" -- Borjas had staked almost everything on Clinton's candidacy. "When I see Hillary Clinton, I see everything that's happened to you, has happened to me, just on a bigger stage. I refuse to sit back and see this happen to another woman."

Borjas says her support for Clinton met with increasing hostility from other local party activists, who were solidifying support for Obama. "I would definitely say intimidation, death threats." Death threats? After being repeatedly pressed to explain, Borjas elaborates. "Shut up and don't talk. Shut up in telling what you know."

Smothering her newly found voice feels like death to Monica Borjas. And that's why she won't be honoring Hillary Clinton's request that she vote for Barack Obama in November. "I can identify with her in every way, but it's my vote," she explains. "It's my vote, but I don't have to give it to anyone."

On Tuesday evening, Hillary Clinton addresses the Convention in what is hoped will be her definitive endorsement of Obama. "I want you to ask yourself were you in this campaign just for me?" she asks the packed convention hall in what is unquestionably the finest speech of her career. "It's time to take back the country we love, and whether you voted for me or you voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose." But she stops just short of releasing her delegates, freeing them to vote for Obama on Wednesday.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The shuttle bus for Tuesday's post-convention party for the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania-Florida delegation in the club lounge at Invesco Field has finally shown up, about a half-mile walk and a half an hour from where it was supposed to be. Eleanor Stickland, a former software designer from a large retirement community in Florida, has settled herself into a front seat. "I was so excited about coming here, and so disappointed when she didn't win," the Clinton delegate says. "I'm 67 years old, and all these years I've fought the system. It's nice to see a woman get ahead."

And Strickland knows what it takes to get ahead. It's the story of her life. She started out in advertising -- when as a woman with a master's degree but an entry-level title, she had to train new male college graduates with no experience, but a bigger salary and the title of account executive. Women, no matter what their position in the company, had to take turns staffing the reception desk at lunchtime. Men never did. Strickland left advertising for the infant field of software design, where men one again dominated. It was an old story, she says, and one she watched with a sinking feeling when she saw the late Tim Russert repeatedly go after Clinton in a series of presidential debates. Russert treated Clinton differently from the male candidates, and at more than one point he drilled into Clinton when an answer wasn't "black or white, but he tried to force her into something."

At the campaign wore on, Strickland learned to live with diminished expectations, "That's all I want to do, to be able to cast a vote for her and have it count," she says. "Anything less than that and I will vote for him but I won't support him much."

Inside the party, as delegates chew on the obligatory chicken satay and -- at least in New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania -- soft pretzels, the elevators are suddenly shut down. It's a Secret Service hallmark, but most of the partygoers are surprised when Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea Clinton pop in. "Some people think all we have to do in November is show up," says Clinton, urging the delegates to keep actively campaigning for the Democratic ticket straight through until Election Day. And Bill Clinton, still struggling with his own feelings about the end of his wife's campaign, has his own talking points. "Look, man, people are hurting," the former president explains.

At Wednesday morning's delegation breakfasts, delegates learn the party has taken the unusual step of asking them to vote in a preconvention balloting that will allow party officials to tally up the vote and decide which states will be allowed to publicly announce their vote -- enough for Hillary, but not too much, before the rules are suspended and Clinton asks that the convention nominate Barack Obama by acclimation. The votes will be counted, in a move the party hopes will appease Clinton delegates but will not become part of the public proceedings. Ballots must be cast by 4 p.m., but most delegations have set a deadline of noon -- which means most Clinton delegates must vote before they know they are released.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Outside New York's breakfast in the Sheraton, Clinton delegate Rosina Rubin is in line long before the balloting opens. "Before I came here, I had people calling me, e-mailing me, stopping me on the street saying they didn't want me to change my vote," Rubin, clad in a Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit and a gold script pin that spells out "Hillary," explains.

"It's a weighty responsibility. It's my only responsibility here."

For the 53-year-old Rubin, a small business owner, "This has been a really exhausting campaign. It would be really great if some people who are my age, who are yelling at the television, would get out and work on it, get out the vote.

Most Popular

"We're going to do this one way or another", she continues. "Then we'll get back to doing what we should have been doing."

Not far behind Rubin in line is another Clinton delegate, Toby Ann Stavisky, the New York State Senate minority whip. "Of course our hearts were broken, and our minds," says Stavisky, who in 1999 was the first woman from Queens County to be elected to the State Senate and whose first convention was in 1984, when she came to San Francisco as a Mondale delegate. "But hearts and mind heal."

What may not heal quite so quickly is Clinton's campaign debt, however. Despite an Obama promise to help retire the estimated $20 million debt, Obama supporters have kicked in only about $200,000. "That's a drop in the bucket," says Stavisky.

Rumors are circulating that Clinton will address her delegates at the Convention Center at around 1 p.m. By noon Judy Monaghan, Clinton delegate and Clinton whip from Nebraska, has been delivered from MSNBC in a golf cart and is comfortably settled in a large red chair.

"I was elected by Nebraska Clinton voters and they sent me here," explains Monaghan during a brief lull in the nearly incessant ringing of her cell phone. "We've been told, vote your conscience. [But] it's very painful; it hurts."

Monaghan and her husband, Tom, who was a U.S. Attorney, have a long history with the Clintons, dating back to when she was assigned to keep watch over the presidential wannabe Bill Clinton at a candidate steak fry. But she says that's not what influenced her choice of candidates. "It's not so much the person. I need qualifications, and Hillary Clinton meets those qualifications and surpassed them.

"I was one of the walking wounded for a while, " she continues. "But the hurt that some of us feel today will be so much worse" if the Republicans win in November. "I'm sure going to work for Obama after this. He runs a helluva campaign -- wow," she adds with a note of professional admiration.

If all the people gathered to hear Clinton release her delegates actually were her delegates, she would be accepting the nomination tonight. Instead she is on a platform to the right of a large function room, telling the assemblage that as a New York delegate, "I signed my ballot this morning for Sen. Obama."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

But, she adds, "a lot of people in this room who are signing their ballots have made a different choice. What is so important is that at the end of the day we will nominate Barack Obama and Joe Biden for the president and vice president of the United States."

Dana Kennedy, a Clinton delegate from Arizona, stands with red-rimmed eyes as Hillary Clinton releases her delegates to "vote your conscience." It's a moot point, and some will later say a disingenuous one, as most of them have already voted at their state delegation breakfasts. But Kennedy thinks Clinton was doing delegates a final favor by delaying the release. It made casting her ballot "easy... I wasn't released, so I voted for Hillary."

Kennedy is the executive director of Emerge Arizona, a nonprofit organization training Democratic women for leadership positions. She thinks it will be work, but not impossible, to turn Clinton supporters into Obama supporters. "People had to talk to people and convince them that a woman could be president of the United States. Now we have to go back to all those and convince them that an African American can be president of the United States."

Eighty-three-year-old Florida delegate Eufaula Frazier missed hearing the Clintons speak to the Florida party the night before -- the delegate bus driver, in an unfortunately common event, got lost on the way from the Pepsi Center -- but she was able to get Hillary Clinton's autograph on her delegate badge after Clinton released her delegates. It's Frazier's tenth Democratic Convention, and she's been behind every Democrat from McGovern to Kerry, but this was something different, something special. "I was for Hillary because I've been in the women's movement for a long time," she explains. "Hillary just happens to be the woman." In her ninth decade, Frazier never expected to come this close to seeing a woman become the Democratic Party standard-bearer. But as a black woman, she has received a lot of criticism from people who would not understand why she was not supporting another first, the man who'd looked for months like he'd be the first African American presidential nominee.

The civil rights movement was slow to recognize the legitimacy of the women's movement. Movement women were often expected to be seen, not heard. Settling back into a seat on a shuttle bus -- this one not lost, only late -- headed to the Pepsi Center for the roll call vote, Frazier explains how she answers those who thought her vote should be race-based: "I'm for Hillary, and don't ask me why," she'd say, thus effectively cutting off unproductive debate. Frazier has been sporting a Clinton button since before the primaries began, but as soon as she was released, she reached into her purse and put an Obama button beneath it.

Inside the Pepsi Center, a complicated bit of choreography unfolds flawlessly, as states voted and passed until Illinois made a symbolic yield to New York, and the state's junior senator was able to move that Barack Obama be nominated by acclimation. No messy vote totals complicating a final show of unity.

Myra Winovich missed an e-mail telling her that a credential had been found that would have allowed her into the Pepsi Arena to witness Wednesday night's abbreviated roll call vote. She was particularly aggrieved to have missed the chance to hear Bill Clinton speak. But now she's scored a credential that admits her to Invesco Field. For a few hours, then, there will be no convincing, only celebrating.

One of the things Winovich likes most about Obama volunteer training sessions is how they go around the room and tell their personal stories. It seems to bring them all closer. So from now until November 4, she'll be going up to women everywhere, on street corners and at lunch counters, and asking them to tell her their stories. She'll commiserate a little, maybe offer a few hugs. And then the retired Realtor will move in to close the sale.

"What woman is not interested in health care?" she asks rhetorically. "What woman is not interested in working for equal pay? What woman is not interested in having choices about her body? About her children's education? Every woman's story relates to something in Barack's platform."